


Amber

by scioscribe



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Biological Warfare, Desperation, First Time, M/M, Murder, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-21 00:00:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/591165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amber means steady conditions of acceptable risk.</p>
<p>Q has neglected to program in a green all clear: he doesn’t imagine they will need one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amber

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Янтарь](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7973269) by [littledoctor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledoctor/pseuds/littledoctor)



**50**

The new outpost branch is in a back-of-nowhere desert where the air smells like chalk. It reminds Q of a schoolroom and he forgets the name of where they are two minutes after they’ve landed there and Bond has pried his hands off the armrests and led him down the ramp. He stops shaking after he plants his feet on the ground.

Bond doesn’t ask why Q tore one of his fingernails down past the quick holding on and he doesn’t ask why Q didn’t just take tranquilizers before takeoff and knock himself out, enjoy the perks of the First World while he still had them. Q appreciates people with the sense to keep their questions to themselves.

He puts on his sunglasses and Bond says, “Don’t you look smart.”

**49**

Their assignment is as rudimentary as such things can be. Q will oversee the initial laboratory development of this latest adjunct and make sure all the ears and eyes in the walls listen and look with their trembling little microfilaments like outstretched fingers; he will ensure transfer of some fundamentals to the rawest of the recruits. This will be a pain in the arse because none of them will think he’s old enough to tell them what to do.

That, among other reasons, is why Bond is there with him: a scowling, solid presence lending him support, vaguely implying with that cool smile of his that people who buck Q’s authority overmuch won’t be making it out of the desert alive.

The range and variety of the small armory Bond has with him whispers that Q’s been left out of the loop on at least one of Bond’s guiding commandments.

“Are you my bodyguard?”

Bond shrugs as though the question is irrelevant. “If someone tries to kill you, I’ll stop them.”

“Is it _likely_ for someone to try to kill me?”

“Depends on how well they know you.” The corner of his mouth flickers upwards just for a sliver of a second.

“I’m glad the prospective risk to my life is an occasion for us all to have a good chuckle.”

Bond reaches out, almost casually, and draws one fingertip across the cuff of Q’s shirt; circles it around the button. It happens the way everything with Bond happens: so quickly that Q will think, later, that he’s imagined it or at least miscalculated its importance.

“I asked to come,” Bond says.

**48**

The equipment he uses here is different from what he uses at home. Because of the aridity, he explains to Bond, who pretends to listen simply by being there, day-in and day-out. Because of the temperature, the weather conditions, the possibility of sandstorms. The outer sensors, obviously, he says, but also the ones in the walls, because grit has a way of getting everywhere and so do other various externalities, although you wouldn’t think it.

“The modern age is depressingly similar to those that came before it,” he says. “The spanner, please?”

Bond fetches it up to him. “Never pictured you messing about with tools.”

“One: I’m not ‘messing about,’ I’m implanting listening devices, which I would think would be the sort of shady governmental work you would appreciate. Two: how do you think I _make_ everything you bring back to me in pieces?” If he bothers to bring it back at all. “It doesn’t just spring from my head fully formed, Athena from the brow of Zeus.”

“I didn’t say you didn’t,” Bond says, reasonably enough. “I said I didn’t think about it.”

Q blinks at an oil-stain on the wall and pushes up his glasses. “God save me, 007, from the things you don’t think about.”

**47**

He calls in once a day to check in with Eve. In every conversation, he asks her if MI6 thinks the situation they sent him into is dangerous, unstable.

“Sharing quarters with Bond? Perhaps,” she says the first time he asks, but over the course of a week, he wears her down. M and his ilk have the virtue of clean hands by the bodies that ring around them as insulation from the sound of gunfire and the sight of blood: their talent is distance the way Bond’s is intimacy, the close-in kill, the honey trap. Eve can lie to him as smoothly as anyone once or even twice, but day after day, he is too real to her, and the upper-management talent for moving people around like pieces on a board becomes compromised. She says, finally, that he isn’t wrong.

“We can’t be sure. But it’s a hot situation, obviously.”

Though what is obvious to her isn’t obvious to him—she has classified information from hundreds of governments, legitimate and puppet, streaming in front of her eyes each hour. Q can get it, but he has to grapple for it, and most of the time he simply can’t be bothered.

“Why send me?” He isn’t a narcissist and he isn’t pettish: it’s a genuine question. Q knows his worth to them and how much it would cost to replace him. He isn’t to be risked lightly.

“Expedience. Whatever happens, we do need a set-up, and you were chosen as the one likeliest to work quickly under pressure.”

Q drank bubble tea with Eve Moneypenny once, drank bubble tea and ate reheated Chinese, because all the deliveries in the earliest days of the new headquarters went massively awry: they bitched about being Torchwood, ordering pizza to their secret base, and they switched fortune cookies when each liked the other’s better. There is, he thinks, a strangeness to have that and still send him to what might be the end of him. He doesn’t blame her: it is what it is.

Bond says, “Some people aren’t meant to be field agents,” and he’s smiling, just a little.

Q tells him that it’s rude to eavesdrop. That night, he works faster, staying awake until his eyes feel like they’ve been pricked with needles and his fingertips are numb.

**46**

He teaches Bond how to install the basics.

“Do you always listen to everything?” Bond asks as he tacks in a wire.

Q rubs his eyes. He says, “After a while, it’s hard not to. I listen to everything of yours. When you’re out. Although for this I suppose I won’t have to, will I? Why did you come?”

“It would take too long to say,” Bond says. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

**45**

What explanation there is, in its briefest form, Q gets two days later, when he’s so exhausted he can hardly see straight. (His work is still perfect. There is no excuse for shoddiness, not when so much is at stake, and there’s no use in saving his life if he loses his precision, his pride.) He’s on a ladder, Michelangelo painting the ceiling, laying in warning devices to detect surface vibrations, and Bond says, “You’re too tired.”

“I’m not.” There are three delicate, lacy, almost confectionary-like components in front of him that need insertion, but for the life of him, he can’t tell which is real until he lays a hand on it. There. That one. Its lights flash amber at him reassuringly.

Amber means steady conditions of acceptable risk.

Q has neglected to program in a green all clear: he doesn’t imagine they will need one.

Bond says, “You’re tired. You need to go to bed.”

Q looks down at him. Their only conditions are amber; amber is the best possibility of a thousand that are worse. He climbs down the ladder and presses his mouth against Bond’s in what’s more of a grab than a kiss. So far as such things go, it is something less than ideal. He has no patience and no interest in softness, not now, and part of him wants to hurt Bond for a dozen different reasons. For not telling him that he was at risk. For not telling him that they were both at risk. For fucking _volunteering_ his fucking _life_.

But the light is amber and amber is all that they have: Bond is kissing him back just as gracelessly, just as hard.

**44**

“I wish we’d done this when we weren’t going to die,” Q says.

Bond says, “You’re not going to die.”

**43**

It’s interesting, Q decides: purgatory as holiday, or summer camp in an American film. Some ad hoc combination of espionage-related arts and crafts and fucking. Not to mention the chance that they’ll find themselves in bitter rivalry with the camp across the lake. Bond says, “The lake’s an ocean and the other camp is all around us,” seconds before he puts his hand on Q’s cock and erases concerns of metaphor from his mind altogether. Bond is the antidote to thought, Q decides, though he has to decide this, obviously, on the now rare occasions when Bond is not touching him.

Bond is hungry for him. Q has teeth-marks on his skin. But more than that, Q thinks that for all of Bond has said about how young Q is, Bond is painfully foolish about love, as if he thinks that nothing can happen to Q as long as Q is under his eyes, under his hands, pinned down by the weight of his gaze.

He should know better. Then again, if coldness is the reserve of those not in the field, the stupidity or insanity necessary to expect that bad situations will somehow sweeten belong exclusively to people like Bond, who keep thinking that their bodies will go against infinity and win. And who are sometimes, more infuriatingly, right.

Q has no interest in infinity.

**42**

Bond makes the required calls to Eve and to M, now. He doesn’t mention that their situation has changed. All roads to lead to MI6, where the sun is still trying hard not to set on the British Empire, and if they bothered to listen to the feedback from the devices Q buries in the walls and floors between sessions with Bond, they would know, but neither of them see a point in saying it. Bond is used to having his life overheard, in any case, and Q is as interested in fucking over the powers that be, or at least discomfiting them, as he is in fucking Bond. Eve doesn’t ask, in any case.

Q entertains himself: it’s a Mills & Boon set-up, maybe, sending him into the middle of nowhere with a bodyguard and mere days going by before they try to set each other’s skin on fire, moving restlessly on their government-issued sheets. There is no one and nothing coming for them. It’s only that Eve and M, in their infinite wisdom, want their agent and his quartermaster shagging. That would be an interesting kind of world to live in.

**41**

The truth, so far as such things exist, is rather that their silence is less complicity than it is apathy. Not that they are pleased or even that they are neutral but more that there is, simply, no issue in what two dead men choose to do with each other in their final hours.

There are rules against such things, but not for them. Not anymore.

If they live—and they may live yet—things may change.

Better to flare out than to smolder, in such a case.

**40**

Their raw recruits turn up day after next. When Bond turns up to tell him, Q is still in bed, lying on his stomach tapping idly at laptop keys, encrypting the security system again out of boredom. The sheets could do with changing, obviously, but he decides that’s a task for a man more convinced he’ll live through the next month.

“I felt them coming miles away,” Q says. “Look.” He drags up the other window and shows Bond the external camera footage. “Connected it to the magnified earthquake sensors we’ve been stretching out into the sand. There’s not a camel that takes a piss without me getting buzzed on it, let alone a herd of double-ohs trampling the landscape flat.”

“The landscape’s flat already. Should I let them in?”

Q rolls over. “Do you work for me now?” It’s genuine curiosity. He has no sensors for this, no way of knowing for certain, but Bond’s loyalties _have_ shifted. Late last night, in the one corner of the building where Q had placed cotton over the ears in the walls and blindfolded the eyes, Bond told Q that Silva asked him to run away with him. _In his way_ , Bond said, his fingers light and warm—the only sunshine in all the world—on the nape of Q’s neck. _He said he did more on the run with a computer than he ever did through other channels._

Bond came with him, to live or die, and he proves his devotion in every spare moment. Then again, Bond is a knight, a bloodthirsty champion looking for someone to serve, to lend him the legitimacy of their standard. Q will do.

(If M had lived past Skyfall, Q knows, they wouldn’t be where they are now: no second print of a head on the pillow next to him.)

But Bond ties his life to letters and spills his blood for them and his loyalty is fucking absolute: it’s a dangerous thing to be given.

“In England, I’m England’s,” Bond says. “And anywhere else but here.”

 _Here,_ he doesn’t say, _I’m yours_ , but Q hears it all the same, and their recruits stand outside just a little longer.

When the one thing they don’t have to waste is time, spending minutes and hours is the only way they have to tell each other what they don’t say.

**39**

The recruits all have wind-burned faces and Q thinks that _they’re_ the ones who look too young.

Bond keeps his hand at his hip. The gun is almost luridly visible.

Q says, “Yes, hello, we’re who you’re meeting. Welcome to the end of the world.”

“You didn’t have to keep us waiting,” says one of the older ones, no spots but all arrogance, not knowing his place.

“I don’t have to keep you at all,” Q says. He inclines his head towards Bond, who looks somewhat like a panther in a still painfully well-ironed suit: the same coiled musculature, the same patient apathy toward death. “Please take note and do not fuck with me.”

**38**

There are six of them, all equipped with names that most likely aren’t their own. Some of them wear them better than others, but none of them have been long in their positions: no sense, M must have realized, in putting too many high-priced eggs in one precariously balanced basket. Bond and Q are all the true talent he will risk. No, these are not top-notch, well-oiled assassins and spies; they’re green, most of them without scars.

(Bond pays attention to Q’s various acquisitions of damage: slow, lavish attention, _knowledgeable_ attention, the steady understanding of someone who truly understands pain, and he doesn’t ask about them anymore than he asked about the tremors on the plane.)

They call themselves Bradley, Willems, MacKenzie, Lo, Tapley, and Prett.

Q calls them cannon fodder, although not when they’re listening.

Bond says he makes too much of them: they may be sheep herded onto the slaughterhouse floor, but they’re sheep who would hold the knives themselves. He says that Q can’t forget that white wool doesn’t mean no teeth. Q says that he talks too much and bites his lower lip for him, forcing a hesitation, and then he, who talks too much himself, says, “If I gave up on killers, I’d have nothing left.”

**37**

Lo is the best shot and the best at the mechanics of reprogramming the palm-responses on the weaponry, but he’s shit at watch: falls asleep every time he has to spend hours doing nothing but keeping his eye on surveillance.

Prett can watch the sensor lines because he knits. Bond bribes him to make Q a scarf, which Q pretends not to know about. It’s Ravenclaw colors, which must have been Prett, because there is no fucking way Bond came up with that on his own. (But it’s Prett who stomps on the mouse he finds in the storage room, leaves it flat and bloody under his boot. Q is the only one to blink at this. Sheep with knives in their hands.)

Willems never changes her facial expression and can watch surveillance and shoot with the same dead-eyed accuracy. She is serviceable at the programming tasks and learns steadily, but something about her makes Q nervous.

MacKenzie is ostensibly friendly: Scottish and broad-shouldered and loud, with a carefully trimmed beard, and he’s the first to notice that Bond and Q can’t keep their hands off each other. He takes this as permission to wank off louder than necessary and, after two days, to start shagging Willems, who appears to regard Mac, as he prefers, as some sort of unusually active vibrator.

Bradley smiles too much and says nothing. His aim is poor, but in hand-to-hand, he comes within inches and seconds of besting Bond, who’s sulky about it. He can’t stay awake without coffee. His computer skills are nonexistent.

Tapley is the spat-upon, kicked-about weakling, as though the others have deduced the summer camp aspect of Q’s earlier framing and ostracized one of their fellows accordingly. Tapley coughs too much and pumps asthma medication into his mouth. He stares at everything with his eyes just a little too wide.

**36**

It’s on the tip of his tongue.

He almost has it.

**35**

Q is clever— _not such a clever boy_ —and he knows how he would do it, how he would leave scorched earth where Britain’s latest installation went to ground. He knows he would not send tanks and he knows he would not send snipers. He knows, he knows, he wakes up knowing, his head against Bond’s shoulders, saying, “Tannhauser Gate,” through a mouth that feels rimed with frost, that’s how cold he’s gone. How do you take the city that can’t be taken?

**34**

How do you take the city that can't be taken?

**33**

You get yourself invited in.

**32**

Bond moves the pillow in front of Tapley’s face and fires without even waking him up. Blood hits the walls and the underside of the pillowcase, which Bond then strips methodically away and sets ablaze with a compact silver lighter from his jacket. It’s all cleanup after that. Bond pours bleach on everything and even washes his hands in it, and then in water that steam rises up from in curls. He keeps his hands in the basin for so long Q thinks there can’t be skin on his fingers anymore. All this, he watches from the surveillance cameras, because Bond says there are contamination risks and contamination risks, and he won’t—can’t—let Q be counted as the former and not the latter. Whatever sense that makes.

Bond’s hands are boiled, lobster-red, but he still won’t let Q touch him.

“For fuck’s sake,” Q says. “We don’t _know_ that he was infected.”

All the know is what Q found—and didn’t find—on the system about Tapley, no-name Tapley, last and least, with his persistent cough and his breathe-in-breathe-out steroid. He had too little information in places and too much in others. It was a biography put together by someone who knew how certain countries kept their systems but didn’t know England’s, didn’t know Q’s. He said, “Him,” and Bond didn’t ask any further questions.

But Bond was the one who said it was biological.

Now, with the smell of soap and bleach clinging to him, he says, in response to Q, “That’s how I would do it, in their place.”

If Q gives up on killers, he’ll have nothing left.

(And all Bond’s trying hasn’t kept Tapley’s blood off Q’s hands, not when Q came awake thinking of him and that cough, and so he wouldn’t even have himself.)

**31**

Bond won’t touch him, true, but Bond is looking at him when he says, “Run.”

Q laughs. His laugh is too loud even to his own ears, as if he’s already lying. His voice is always louder when he starts to lie; prevarication doesn’t suit him. “I’d say you’ve been thorough in eliminating the threat.”

“Not as thorough as some. Not if I’m right.”

They’re in the cone of silence corner, as Q’s taken to calling it, the only exception, the only blind spot, and it was Bond who put them there after Tapley, who maneuvered him there as briskly as he’d taken him off the plane those weeks before. Before everything, Q thinks, because it is everything—he would have nothing left, and the opposite of nothing is everything, _quod erat demonstratum_ —and he can’t, he can’t.

Some people aren’t meant to be field agents, and those who aren’t are meant to pull the strings, to say who will die in far-off places in ways that they will never see.

“They wouldn’t,” Q says, but he doesn’t believe it. His voice is louder. He knows.

Bond says nothing—he knows the truth the way Q knows it, or rather the opposite of how Q knows it, because Q was never one for the field himself, always the one on the other end of the wire, a ghost on the line, nothing real, nothing connected to the flesh and blood of the cost. To the trigger being pulled. Q knows that MI6 will order them burned to the ground, will order the doors sealed with them inside before the fire comes; he knows this because it’s what he would do.

Bond is used to death and dying. He knows the way their petty gods conduct themselves.

Somewhere down the hall, a phone is already ringing.

**30**

Q says, “I won’t,” and his voice is low and level.

The truth.

**29**

Bond does not scream or plead—he’s not that kind of man—but he comes close to both, and he finally touches Q, to hell with the danger of it. He wraps one hand around Q’s wrist. His skin is still hot and it’s softer than usual; damaged. Q feels kinship with it and fucks over the possibility of danger himself by raising his wrist, and with it Bond’s hand, to his lips, and pressing his mouth to those red knuckles. If Bond was asking a question, surely this is an answer. It is, isn’t it?

Bond’s eyes say that he knows it and he says, “You were supposed to be smarter than that.”

“Well, I fucked my brains out over the last few weeks, didn’t I?” He’s being inaccurate, or at any rate imprecise, which he hates, but he doesn’t have the necessary language for Bond. “And anyway, there’s the rest of them.”

It’s a smokescreen. He cares begrudgingly about Bradley, about Lo, MacKenzie, Prett, Willems—but even if they were miles away and safe, his situation would be unchanged. And he doesn’t suggest Bond offer them the safe chance he’s offered Q. He doesn’t even offer it back to Bond: it would be pointless. He only belongs to Q when he doesn’t belong to England, and this is England’s business, the elimination of them, their suicide of themselves.

The secret of their presence here must be kept as much as possible, and, failing that, the secret of their failure must never be allowed to leave.

Let alone the disease.

**28**

When they step out of the cone, Bond looks towards the ceiling—not that it matters, the eyes are everywhere. _Multiplex_ , Q thinks, remembering his Delany—and says, “We can afford to wait until we know for sure. No use causing a panic. And I don’t imagine you’ve sent us even one with bio-training, knows how to hold a scalpel.”

The phone down the hall stops ringing.

It’s Willems who pads down the hall, curiously young in slippers and plaid pajamas, and armed to the teeth, a grenade in one fist. “What’s happening?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Q says, nodding at the grenade. “No one’s bombing us and you’ve got nothing to use _that_ on.”

“You never know,” she says.

“She’d be the best of them,” Bond says after she’s gone back down the hall. “Good self-preservation skills, listens to her superiors. Cool under pressure.”

“She’s dead behind the eyes.”

“And soon to be dead everywhere else, most likely. Dead behind the eyes is an asset, you know.” His hand is still around Q’s wrist, as if he’s no intention of dropping it. “It saves you a lot of trouble.”

“Is that what I am?”

“If you weren’t that, you’d have to be everything else,” Bond says.

**27**

It’s strange, waiting around to see if they’re going to die.

Q teaches Bond how to play Sudoku—he doesn’t care for it—and when he tires of that, he makes up first-person shooter games with crude animation and has Bond teach him how to aim in a way that won’t waste bullets. He programs in recoil. Bond knows why he wants to learn—Bond’s hands are still weaker than they should be, the skin peeling from them, and stinking half the time with salve, and triggers require finesse—and teaches him, even though he says it’s harder when the targets aren’t zombies. Q takes staff pictures and superimposes them over the shambling bodies; spends hours killing himself, and Bond, and all the rest.

“You’d have been good at it,” Bond says. “Field work.”

The getting in close aspect, he means. It’s a compliment, to Bond, that Q can wait to fire until he sees the whites of their eyes, that he can do it without losing his stomach.

Q learned it from him: the ruthlessness it takes to conceive of such a thing and the strange affection it takes to carry it out. The perverse intimacy with the people you murder.

**26**

But he flinches when it comes to killing even the icons with Bond’s face. He would not make a good field agent, actually: some people don’t.

**25**

“The phones aren’t working,” Lo says.

Q asks who the fuck he was going to call from a secure outpost, anyway.

“We aren’t doing anything. They ought to be calling you back.”

“Because we get in the way so much, do we, me and him?”

Lo says, “We don’t need you, that’s all.”

“No,” Q says. “I suppose you don’t.”

It’s other people that need him there: people who trust in the chill of his blood and his loyalty to country. And Bond, of course. Bond needs him, for what that’s worth.

**24**

(It’s worth everything.)

**23**

Prett says, “I finished your scarf,” and he holds it out. It’s too long, but Q’s sister knits, and he knows the type: Prett got bored and carried away and then didn’t have the patience to undo the extra work his hands had done without him noticing. No Penelope, Prett. “I didn’t know if you’d want it or not. I think he might have meant it as a joke, but I thought fuck it all, anyway, it isn’t like there’s anything else to do.”

The scarf is as soft as any Q’s ever touched; the blue as dark as midnight and the silver like the moon. Besides, they won’t live till Christmas anyhow, not for him to get another one of his sister’s presents, so he takes it with a nod of thanks.

Prett clears his throat. “We’re not stupid, you know. It’s not like we think Tapley just left in the middle of the night to bugger a camel, decided to start a family.”

“You know,” Q says, “I don’t even know that there are any camels here. It’s not like there are wolves in every part of England.” Unless he counts the ones who smile as Bond does, who kill as cleanly, who don’t scavenge, who hunt alone. “I don’t even remember where we are, let alone speak the language. It’s something to think of, I suppose. There’s such a fucking arrogance to us, isn’t there? A self-centeredness. Not England, I mean, just people. I thought we were going to be fine, when we came here, so I didn’t bother. You can’t even fathom the number of towns he’s burned flat in his time, but as soon as it comes to being us, it’s worth weeping over. He doesn’t even know the names of all the people he’s done in, but here we are.”

“You think about things too much,” Prett says.

“I only mean that to be killed by people you don’t know—to be killing people you don’t—I wish I knew a little more, is all. Do you know where we are?”

“I don’t give two shits where we are.”

“But you’re going to _die_ here.” It seems worth pressing and, despite his agreement with Bond about keeping silent, acceptable: Prett obviously knows as much.

“I’ve got it already. I let him borrow my canteen on the way in, see? And I’ve been coughing up blood the last two days. I’d have said, but I thought you must know already, you and him. That’s why you’re still here.”

Q nods.

“The doors don’t open anymore,” Prett says. “In case you were wondering. So as far as I’m concerned I’m dying on British soil anyhow.”

“However you like to think about it,” Q says. He winds the scarf around his throat.

Prett nods at it and puts his hands in his pockets, a bit of red-splotched tissue poking out of one corner. “Looks good on you. I thought when we met you and I might—but then MacKenzie said you were with the double-oh. And he asked me for the scarf, so. But I think I’ll go, now. It doesn’t matter, does it, whether I wait for you to do it or not? I’ve got a gun.”

“No,” Q says. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Ta, then,” Prett says, and he touches his forehead briefly, like a salute. Q waits in the hall until he hears the shot and then goes to tell Bond.

**22**

“There’s no point in doing it early,” Bond says.

Q rubs his knuckles against his forehead and then feels childish for it: it’s what he did years ago when he got stress headaches, which he doesn’t have now, anyway. “There’s no point in doing it late, either. Unless you think they might all knock themselves off, one by one, and save us the trouble.” They would still have to call an airstrike in on their own heads, though, or however they’re planning on doing it, when it comes to that.

“Willems wouldn’t.”

“No. MacKenzie either, which I suppose means they’re not a bad match.”

There’s a chance he and Bond are, or would be in better and less desperate circumstances, but that, like their method of suicide, is a thought he hasn’t spent much time on. Love at the end of the world must still count as love to whoever does the counting. Bond came for Q and Q stayed for Bond; that’s more than most people have in their lifetimes and more than MacKenzie and Willems will live to see, however well-paired they are.

And love isn’t worth half as much as knowing, Q sometimes suspects, and he knows Bond like he knows no one else, like he has never taken the interest to know anyone else. “You think that if you wait long enough, you’ll convince me to leave. You think I won’t catch it. I’ve got his fucking scarf around my neck, 007, whatever there is to catch, I’ve _caught_. It’s as good a time as any.”

But Bond presses his mouth to Q’s in what isn’t a kiss and whispers, “Wait a little longer.”

**21**

Lo is worse for wear and coughs so hard he ruptures a blood vessel in his eye and drowns the white in red. He drinks a lot. At what’s left of a civilized meal—they have it around midnight, Q’s only in his pants, and all any of them bother to make are cheese toasties—Lo says that he wishes he’d never met any of them, but if this is how it’s going to be, he wishes someone would do it already. Tapley left easily, he says, and Prett. It’s not fair to him to let it drag.

“Do it yourself then,” Bradley says. He’s still smiling, always smiling. There’s blood on his teeth. When Q locks the door of his and Bond’s room at night, it’s Bradley that he’s thinking of. “Won’t hurt but a moment.”

“I’m Catholic,” Lo says. His voice is so ruined from all the coughing that it’s all he can do to whisper.

“God won’t forgive you for it, eh?”

Lo has good sense—he had good sense back when he was asking why Q was even still there—and he shudders at the keen interest in Bradley’s eyes and turns to Q instead. “Please,” he says. “Not him. Don’t use him. You, or Mr. Bond, or them,” with a nod at Willems and MacKenzie, “but not him. I don’t want him. He wouldn’t make it quick.”

Bradley smiles.

Bond says, as gently as Q’s heard him say anything, “Don’t worry.”

**20**

So it’s Bradley who dies next instead of Lo. Bond washes his hands afterwards as hard as he washed them after Tapley, even though Bradley’s blood was, so far as any of them knew, as clean as a whistle, and he might have outlived them all.

**19**

Willems kills Lo and comes into the lab and drops the gun on Q’s desk. “I want another one,” she says.

“You want more bullets.”

“Fuck the bullets, I want another gun.” She sets her chin. “When Bond comes for me, when you do, to kill me because you fucked up by letting Tapley in, I don’t want to try for you with what I had to use on Lo. You don’t deserve it.”

Q has nothing to say. He makes her another gun and seals it to her palm-print.

“Thank you, Q,” she says, with Bond’s own cool efficiency, and leaves.

**18**

Bond laughs when he hears it. “I told you she was the best of them.”

“You said because she _listens to her superiors_ , not because she says she wants to _kill_ us.”

“She wants to kill us because she listened to us.” He runs one knuckle down the ladder of Q’s spine. “She doesn’t need you to understand it. She knew you’d tell me, clever girl.” All of their conversations, these days, were multitasked into sex if they went on long enough. Sometimes it meant that the sex was not especially exciting, but Q would settle for it. Enough quantity and they would have their quality, during the rare moments when there was nothing else on their minds, when dying seemed like a dream.

I want to fit in a life with you before we have to go.

His concerns are selfish: Willems is right to want him dead, for that if for nothing else.

**17**

For some reason, there are odd hours where they all persist in pretending that the situation is somehow normal. Willems asks for hand-to-hand with Bond and gets it, though both of them move slowly, as though in underwater ballet. One look at Willems says she’s running a fever, her face the color of chalk, her eyes alive for once, but she still eludes Bond on occasion, slipping around him with a strange animal grace. Q watches and taps keys. The situation back home, apparently, which is good to know: there ought to be a place in the world that stays whole and it might as well be London. He won’t mind dying if he can think about the world still spinning and the elevator at his flat still being in need of repair (it creaks like rusty chains in a Hammer movie, and Q used to naively think it would be the death of him).

So he reads, and Willems and Bond grapple and evade and touch in a slow way that is almost enough to make Q jealous, and MacKenzie watches with more thought on his face than Q’s ever seen.

“Tapley,” he says. “How’d you know?”

“His files weren’t solid enough,” Q says, almost absently. Too many dead since Tapley—he’s almost forgotten him. “Unless they were too much so.”

“But you didn’t look before,” MacKenzie presses. “Something made you think of it.”

Q sighs—he would rather watch Bond, or read the news from home, but MacKenzie is almost as pale as his girlfriend, and there is too little time left for him to waste it on petty resentment—and says, with as much patience as he can fake, “We all knew someone would try, sooner or later, but they hadn’t yet, and I would have, if it were me. And I’d have done it subtly. Not biological, because I wouldn’t know how, but someone sneaking something in. A Trojan Horse. More likely I’d have used an actual Trojan—the worm, not the condom—but not everyone has my scruples or expertise. Anyway, it was Tapley, in through the Tannhauser Gate.”

“That’s what it was called?”

“Where the Horse came in.”

“Never was much for classics. I suppose you’d know, though,” and it takes Q a full minute to realize that MacKenzie means that obviously Q’s the sort to know his Greek, and it’s a _gay joke_ , and when Q blinks at him, because _what the fuck_ , MacKenzie almost smiles.

“Snickers bar says mine will take yours,” he says, as Willems ducks under Bond’s hands again.

Q closes his laptop. “On.”

**16**

Bond wins. Q eats the Snickers bar.

**15**

Eve calls and Q is almost glad to hear from her.

“Four still alive, and oddly enough, we’re all paired off. No orgies as of yet, though I’ll let you know if one happens.”

She says, “I thought you would leave,” and her voice has the absolute steadiness Q has only ever heard in people who are trying with all their strength not to break. There will come a day—he’s sure of it—when people call Eve Moneypenny M, but this is the day she has to live through to get to it. “I left the doors unlocked for days. He must have offered it to you. He must have tried to get you to run as soon as he was sure about Tapley.”

“He did,” Q says, because there’s no use in denying it: what will she do, have Bond pulled from the assignment _now_ , as though he’s too unreliable to die properly? “I didn’t take it.”

“The _pair_ of you,” she says, and her voice finally breaks. “He wouldn’t let you come alone and he wouldn’t let you come with anyone else and you think that’s love, Q, but he still let you come, and he knew what it was. He knew what your odds were. He tries to save you after he lets you walk into the middle of a goddamn international firefight and you think you owe it to him for that? And what does he owe you, anyway, that he wouldn’t just stay where he was supposed to? One of you, not both. Not _both_.”

So she is fond of them, then, as much as her profession allows her to be. He wonders why that matters to him, why he’s so glad to know it. “It was hooking Silva’s laptop into the system, wasn’t it? As much as it was M thinking I’d get the job done faster. It was the cock-up. Why it’s me here, and not someone else.”

She doesn’t answer.

“I don’t mind,” he says. “It’s only fair, and there’s a shortage of fairness in the world.”

The line is silent so long he almost thinks she’s hung up on him, but then she says, “Turn off the cameras before you do it, please. Set them to reactivate after it’s done,” and he knows that she will be fine. He presses a kiss to his fingertips and then to the mouthpiece.

“When the time comes,” he says.

**14**

What she said about Bond—he knew that already.

They were in England then, and Bond belonged to it, but now they’re not.

He knows already, too, what matters and what doesn’t. That’s a luxury the dying have.

(He dabs the blood away from his lips.)

**13**

He declares the day a holiday. Willems can no longer stop coughing, though she’ll be damned if she will let Q see a drop of blood on her mouth or clothes. Her fingertips are slightly blue with cyanosis. He will have to tell Bond to take care of her if MacKenzie refuses; it would be wrong, he thinks, to let her die so slowly, her being the way she is. But for now, there is time.

Q will stretch the time like taffy if he can.

Bond says, “There’s nothing to do, you know,” but they play the zombie attack game and Q lets Bond win just so he can stumble across the Easter eggs Q hid inside it. Once the player reaches the last enclave of the living dead, he also finds a vial that, when shattered, sends a pale blue mist through the air. The zombies collapse and then rise, slowly, as though their limbs are stiff, as though they’ve slept a long time. Their skin is whole and solid on their bones. Their eyes are bright. They move and laugh and it’s clear, even through Q’s crappy graphics, that they are alive. They’re not monsters or killers anymore, not the walking dead, they’re only people.

And then the game is over.

Bond places the controller aside very gently, as though it will break, and then he and Q make love as slowly as they ever have. They do it as though they have all the time in the world. Q kisses him with quiet urgency and leaves lip-imprints in blood on his skin; Bond kisses back deeply, wanting his share of whatever’s coming, not wanting to be the survivor.

What lights were amber for them are now red. Q doesn’t care: it’s his day off.

**12**

“Not now,” Q says fuzzily when Bond tries to slip out of bed twenty minutes before midnight. “Not while we're on holiday. Wait a little longer.”

**11**

Bond leaves at two past, then, and Q knows what he’s gone to do. He’s grateful, but he still falls asleep before Bond returns, and only wakes up when Bond puts his arms around him again.

“You’re burning up.”

Q shakes his head: it doesn’t matter. “She didn’t shoot you, did she?”

Bond takes Q’s hand in his and glides it, fingertips down, over his body: face, neck, shoulders, arms, chest. He is still whole.

“She tried, though, I assume?”

“I would have been disappointed if she hadn’t,” Bond says.

**10**

MacKenzie says, the next day, that he’s going to play Q’s videogame for a while, if that’s okay. His eyes are red around the edges, but if he’s infected, Q has seen no sign of it. He walks his player through the maze of dilapidated buildings that are cobbled together from pieces of Q’s old flats and university haunts, from his nightmarishly tilted visions of Bond’s assignment cities, from other zombie games (because life influences art influences art), and he kills things with a straightforward efficiency.

He says, as his player scrambles up a wall, “I’d have done it myself, you know.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

MacKenzie smiles. “You don’t know me very well.” He waits until the field is clear before he continues his advance. He’s already found the flamethrower, which is just slightly better than Bond did on the same level. “But I think I would have married her.”

“I doubt it,” Q says. “She was a bit of a sociopath, wasn’t she?”

“And yours isn’t?”

Q leans forward. “You want to pick up that key there, to your left. It looks like a rock, but it’s a key. You need it to get to the next level.”

“Ta,” MacKenzie says, and runs his player into it.

Q is not, after all, a professional game designer: the only to acquire things in his game world is by running headfirst into them, and, in the breathlessness of the collision, somehow get and keep what it was you wanted.

He doesn’t answer MacKenzie’s question.

**9**

MacKenzie says he won’t kill himself, if that’s what Q and Bond are waiting for him to do. “Not that I’m opposed to it. It’s just that, no offense, I don’t see much of a point to doing it just because the two of you want the last part all to yourselves. Not to mention neither one of you can cook for shit, so you’re better of keeping me around.”

He slides eggs onto Q’s plate.

Q says, “No one’s killing anyone yet,” and lets Bond steal the last of his bacon. He isn’t very hungry anymore. That must be something Bond knows, but Bond seems to think that if Q’s plate is polished clean of all but grease at the end of each meal, the truth won’t matter. Q has no problem with it. Delusions are half of what they have left.

Like the idea that Bond can allow MacKenzie to live much longer.

**8**

Bond begins to run a fever. It does little enough to him. Sometimes what he says to Q seems more disconnected from reality than anything before, but then again, they have very little time left. The lights are all red. Eve has left six messages warning him that sooner or later, MI6 will take care of what they haven’t yet. It doesn’t matter very much whether MacKenzie kills himself or not. Q doesn’t tell Bond this, but suspects that Bond knows anyway, suspects that’s why Bond is more and more careless of his own orgasm and more and more attentive to Q’s, as though he’s the only one that matters, now that the clocks are stopped at five till midnight. Q thinks, _This is what it’s like to be loved_ , and he gets icepacks to try to bring Bond’s fever down until Bond tells him that it doesn’t really matter.

“Anyway,” he says, “you have one too.”

“Good to know we match.”

“Well-suited,” Bond says, and Q thinks fuck MacKenzie and his own doubts and everything else, maybe they could have done it, maybe they could have been happy together.

**7**

There is never enough time.

There will never be enough time.

He breaks half their clocks out of spite.

**6**

MacKenzie says, “If I can get the doors open, I’m going to run.”

“You can’t get the doors open,” Q says. His voice is scratchy: steel wool packed into his throat. “I designed the security system, and _they_ have override controls on all of it. Can’t be done.”

“I’m bored, though,” he says, and spends the day trying.

He won’t go anywhere if he gets out. There is nowhere to go.

“He’s doing it so you’ll shoot him,” Q tells Bond.

Bond says, “Well, he can’t get them open anyway.”

“No.”

“Then he can shoot himself if he likes, but it’s not his dirty work that I get paid to do for him.”

**5**

MacKenzie never does manage to open one of the doors, but he does manage to activate one of the security lockouts that came with the building itself. Barbs bite into the palm of his hand. He comes to Q with it outstretched, like the lion to Androcles, but there’s nothing Q can do about it. MacKenzie is dead—almost but not quite painlessly—within the hour. They’ve not been having burials, only putting the bodies in storage, knowing cremation is coming when the building is razed—so much for the resurrection of the flesh—but even Bond, now, doesn’t have the strength to move MacKenzie.

Q puts the game controller by his hand instead, and they cover him with a sheet.

There’s much less finality to death than one would expect, when there is so much of it, when it’s in the air and when it walks down the corridors. Q feels a faint emptiness and disappointment, but that’s all he has left of grief, now, and all he has left of time.

**4**

Q turns the cameras off and sets them on timer to reactivate two days from now. Forty-eight hours. He doubts it will take that long, but better safe than sorry.

He sends Eve one last message and then shuts his computer down.

**3**

“Why did you come with me?”

Bond says, “I thought it would be a change.”

“The scenery?”

“If I saved your life.”

“You save lots of people.”

“Not like you,” Bond says.

In England, he is England’s, but England is a dream.

“I didn’t mean to ruin that for you.”

“Well,” Bond says, “no sense breaking a streak anyhow.”

And he wouldn’t have known what to do with himself without Bond. You forget it, Q thinks, the habit of being alone, and despite everything that’s happened, he would rather be here.

**2**

How they’re going to do it, he doesn’t know. If they wait until the cameras turn back on, if they’re still breathing when the world turns its eyes to them again, then it’s a matter of hours or even minutes before the problem is taken out of their hands. That would mean—and it is a sanitized image, likely the reality would be uglier—going out together. The ceiling coming down upon them as they lie in bed. A choreographed end, as it were.

But he promised Eve he wouldn’t ask it of her.

They have nine hours left.

Q thinks, _There’s a shortage of fairness in the world_ , and he falls asleep and dreams of Bond saying that he was never able to save anyone like Q. In his dream, the blue light whisks over his face like a broom and clears the dust from his eyes and the infection from his bloodstream, and he wakes with a taste like cold water in his mouth. Love is not a cure, but it’s what he has, and he slides out of bed. Bond doesn’t wake, but his hand reaches over into the cool space that Q has left behind, and he frowns in his sleep.

“I won’t be gone much,” Q says, and even though he’s unsteady on his feet, he stops to bend down and kiss Bond on the forehead. Love is what he has, comfort is what he has, and fairness is what he can give. “Wait a little longer.”

**1**

_You’d have been good at it_ , Bond said, _field work_ , but Q always flinched when it came to shooting the zombies that looked like Bond.

There is no time for flinching now.

He settles back into bed, his hand around the gun that responds only to him. Bond has had to watch too many people he loves die; Q refuses to be the last of them. He kisses Bond slowly— _Sleeping Beauty_ —and says, “Oh, I always meant to tell you my name,” but Bond’s skin is like an oven and he still hasn’t woken up, so Q can't think how it matters. He kisses him again. “I love you. I’d have loved you anywhere, anytime.”

Q no longer believes it’s possible to keep his hands clean, anyway. That’s for people who don’t believe in love.

He is ready. He’s ready and it’s time. He traces the short line from the muzzle of the gun to Bond’s temple. First one and then the other, nothing but a moment between, and he loves, he loves so much, it’s everything, they’re everything, infinity—

**0**

The cameras turn themselves back on at 10:00 AM, and an hour later, there is nothing left but dust.


End file.
